Batson used his Empathy – Altruism Model (EAM) to suggest that people do act altruistically. When someone witnesses a distressing event, they experience 2 kinds of upset: Personal distress: a general unpleasant feeling that the person would want to reduce as soon as possible. Empathy: feeling compassion and sympathy for the victim thus see things from the victim’s perspective. Perspective taking is affected by the perceived similarity between victim and helper and any attachment (friendship or kinship) the helper has with the victim.
People who help to reduce personal distress help for selfish or egocentric reasons, whereas those who help because of empathic concern do so for altruistic reasons. They want to relieve the other persons personal distress, not their own! Another factor is the ease with which one can escape from the helping situation. If it is easy to escape, then this action will help to reduce feelings of personal distress but not true feelings of empathy.
Female participants watched a woman called Elaine (confederate on CCTV as she perceived electric shocks during a learning experiment. Elaine pretended to show increasing personal distress and stated that as a child she had been hurt by an electric fence and hence was particularly distressed by the procedures. It was assumed at this point that all the watching participants would be feeling personal distress watching Elaine. The experiments suggested that the person watching could swap places with Elaine. By agreeing to swap places, participants were showing altruism i. e.
they helped Elaine at cost to themselves (they would now receive the shocks). Batson et al then manipulated the degree of empathy participants felt for Elaine by saying that Elaine had… similar (high empathy condition) or dissimilar (low empathy… attitudes and interests to them. Lots of experimental evidence to support Batsons views. The research, being lab based, is relatively easy to replace to assess reliability and validity. There is also good control of variables. It does establish a link between empathy and altruism and it is true that increased empathy for someone will, in some circumstances increase the likelihood of helping.
As much of the evidence is drawn from lab research it is somewhat reductionlist and overly simplistic. Things get a lot more complicated in real world situations where considerations of family, friends, money, jobs etc… affect people’s behaviour therefore it has low ecological validity. Participants may have guessed that the electric shock were not real and may have acted to please the experimenter (Demand characteristics). This makes it less valid. They may also have been distressed by the experience if they believed the socks to be real, but this could overcome at the end by debriefing.